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2015 Bermuda Triangle Prize

2015 Theme: Space

Evelyn Conley – Winner

To the Ghost of the Sibling I Never Had

You blew through a crack in my window
while a black dog breathed a cloud of warning
from the ground below.
You dropped in, a stone plunked into a bowl,
and lived under my bed
as a mandrake root.
I brought you many ordinary bowls of blood.

This was after mother tended to you.
She gave you to the earth
and sang for you. She left you there.
Father crouched above your stone –
a peddler whose head was bent over
the unleavened bread of you.

You never named yourself, but I could sense
your aspiring eyes reaching up at me through the box springs
and mattress. Some nights I heard
you scrape your rooty limbs
against the hard wood floor,
crawling out to breathe, some nights
to pretend for a moment that you were me.
I never looked, but could hear you
as you read my books and left your grubby finger
marks across the pages.

When I remember you, I think that it would be
ideal to climb up above the roof of our childhood,
so I can see a world beyond you.
From above, I see a garden filled with rune stones.
Some of the stones say memento mori.
Some of the stones say turn me over.

Lisa St. John – Winner

There Must Be a Science to This

There must be a science to this—an improbable equation
or a Fibonacci sequence that refuses to spiral into madness.
These are not my memories. I reject this gift.When I was thirteen they put us in a P.O.W. camp….
Perhaps a little of this drink and some of those pills and a few hits, some greedy sex, and—
I will be fine. I will not accept your nightmares regardless of the remuneration offered.
I refuse this guilt you silently pronounce as mine.I read that suicide is for those people too gentle for this world.
It must be the equal sign that’s missing. Either that or your forgiveness.
I never was any good at math,
where the answers are always the same.
I waited for the new and improved mom to come back from the hospital
each time, but the solution must have been made of imaginary numbers.

Your situation had too many variables for me to try and balance. But your stories stayed with me as memories of things I had never seen…. There must be a science to this—
a sign, a symbol, a proof worth solving.When I was fifteen a soldier took me to a hotel room and….
I will find the puzzle’s missing piece and eat it in remembrance of you.
I was not made to be complete.

Flower Conroy – Finalist

They are afraid of butterflies in the larval stage.
Also, dogs & elephants.

Rings. Of rings. And ringing.

If you cut them—even if you believe them dead—
the blade sears like gamma ray. Their screaming
occurs just beyond the absolute threshold.

The infinite breadth of their knowledge fits into a seed.

Actually, they’re blue in color, & sensitive
toward human feelings. Only due to atmospheric
refraction do they appear greenish.

They manipulate our air.

If you possess: a thermos of plutonium;
a Theremin; 13’ of 9 gauge copper wire; a foot
of PVC pipe; 2 rolls of duct tape; a lemon
& a paperclip; a mirror, a cow, & a bottle of vodka,
you can make a device with which you can
communicate with them.

leave bare, unclothed, no discussion,
no fanfare, just run your body to the harvest
canopies under a 40-watt spot of moon.
Hurry to the unrushed honey field
of shredded corn silk strands, standing stalks,
fallen flaxen husks, sunburned kernels –

let your whole body breathe like
you’re the first free girl in town.
Shifting slates of westward sky
cross aside for the sun, now bathing grain
in light, that cultivated kernel, tortured
beyond itself, unrecognizable to its ancestors.

Martha Snell – Finalist

Like Roofers

we climb over each other, slipping and catching the other’s
hands until our feet are steady. We check eaves, clear leaves, smooth
wrinkles in the casing, then fall to the heat of our slate-­‐shingled skin.

We are a choir, ensemble of song, just two mouths earnest in
harmony. We make mice in the walls weep, our voices pound
tympani, take captive the inner ear of all who stand near.

With no permission, seven decades in, we hike up stairs, climb to highlands,
walk inclines foreign to our peers, heights newly reached to see Bar-­‐headed
Geese cross the Himalayas four miles up, to hear a bank of trumpets shout.

We scale high level étage, Mares’ tails frozen above, countryside
spread out like a toy town, gray and brown squares, dots of green, living
bodies too small to see, some wet in wombs, some soon to die.

I turn on the radio
will myself to hear the news –
only stories of us.